Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Let’s try and not get ahead of ourselves. The battle is far from won you know, But! We will have some albums available, at R 120.00 from the brilliant Wolves Cafe from Monday, 6 December! As we get the album into more shops, we'll let you know.

If you are not in JHB, but residing somewhere else in ZA, drop us a mail at "askylineonfire at gmail dot com", and we can try to get a disk to you!

We’re currently waiting for a few things to fall into place, and then we’ll have a digital version of the album available, as well.

Instead of hand-packaging the albums like a good little Santa-helper, Werner has been busying himself with some renders of the packaging... Really, really useful. Thanks Werner!I kid, Maaike and himself has been doing a sterling job of slapping these babies together.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

So, earlier this year, our dear friends Carin and Casper came over from the SHOTOPOP headquarters in London. They were here to shoot a music video for Christmas Card.

Somewhere between the original idea for the song and the recording, we juiced the song up and molded it into a bit of a rocker. In that process I think we lost sight of how uncomfortable the song made us feel, and was supposed to make us feel.

Thankfully, we are dumb-lucky enough to know friends who didn't forget.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Since we are primarily loop-based (hence our “clever” genre-description, if you’ve never noticed or caught up to that yet), we thought we’d present one of our songs in that fashion, rather than putting yet another mp3 up, pre-launch.

We put this little player together on Tuesday night, with most of the loops drawn from the completed song. It took all of the rest of the week to complete the darn thing. We initially wanted it to be html/javascript based, rather than Flash, but we found the javascript version way too unreliable to be fun, especially in certain browsers (IE8myshorts).

Werner even took some birthday time to get this baby done. Happy B-Day buddy!

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Maaike Bakker is gifted :) Check out her blog in our blog-list. She did the artwork for the album, and here is your first look at it. She grabbed a slice of lyrics from each song, and drew squiggly lines to fit. We love it! Thank you Maaike!

Also, we uploaded a song from these three. You hopefully already know Sinners, and you just need to wait a while longer to hear Up.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Before I could write this update, I had to read my previous post first, to make sure that I’m not backtracking on any previous promises or contradicting myself. It doesn’t seem like I alluded to anything as yet, thankfully.

During the next month, you WILL see more activity from our side. THAT is a promise. If it means that we have to stay up till 2 in the morning, Werner will stay up until 3. If it means clawing each others eyes out over artistic differences, Werner will lose a tooth as well. All of this will be aimed at putting a disk in your hand or an MP3 in your ear, by the end of this year, and maybe entertain you along the way.

I don't want to give too much away now, because I don't want to shoot myself in the foot. Not again. So here is a picture of us looking lost in the woods (notice that we're not looking eye-to-eye):

Monday, October 18, 2010

So here we are: an album called ‘Slow’ taking forever to reach the public.

This post feels like that awkward conversation you have with a really close friend after you haven’t talked for too-long a time. It's not supposed to sound apologetic, although it might come across as the ramblings of a guilty man.

When we started the process of this album, I think we were aiming for an April or May release. We nearly made it! I mean, it’s only October now, and we're almost there - not exactly prolific... Granted, one half of this outfit (me, CF) has been out of action for what feels like forever. Not that I can use my hands for anything constructive at all, but I could have been force-feeding Werner coffee if I had the time.

In all honesty, I think we (I’m talking about the royal we at least) were relaxing a bit after we finished the recording and got the master back. It felt like: “battle won”. Of course that extra time was then automatically filled with stupid life stuff, pffft...

At this stage, I think all that Werner and I want to do is write new music. It seems much easier to come up with a new concept album/EP than it is to come up with a launch strategy. Neither of us have ever been the guy that does the actual planning for a launch, so we keep avoiding the question of a launch date. Hell, we’ve been eclipsed by our brilliant friends Fulka who recorded after us, and have already launched their album.

“Okay CF, enough yada yada. What are you actually saying?”

It is simple really: Werner has been kicking ass in silence, together with mastermind Maaike Bakker, and we’re so, so close. Don’t forget about us, we’re still the same guy. It’s just, we’ve been busy you know... and you don’t have to always wait for me to call.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

- Werner is now either self-employed or unemployed (have not cleared that up yet), which might mean the progress on the album printing and music video conversions and stuff will progress a bit quicker.

- We are shooting another video on Saturday, with our beloved friends Shotopop, whom are here from England to enjoy sunny (yeah right) ZA!

Monday, June 21, 2010

We got the masters back the weekend before last! I am so happy with how it turned out. We had to get the master version of Sinners to Louis Minnaar, so that he could put his pretty with our pretty, and now it's ALL pretty.

If you have not seen it yet, here you go!

We'll be putting it to Beta ASAP and pushing it through to MK as quick as possible.

The artwork for the album is pretty much done, we'll probably see a final mock-up on Thursday, and then it's printing time baby! Hell yeah!

We had a blast playing with brilliant new friends, Eyes Like Mirrors, and old friends, The Ocean Doesn't Want Me, last Friday... Had some fun with a cover of Queen's "I want to break free". Never really realized it but that song has some desperate lyrics to it.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

We took Thursday off from work to visit what can only be called Louis Minnaar's torture dungeon. He made my spine bend in directions that it was never meant to go. After a delightful 6 or 7 hours spent under scorching lights, dressed in black from head to toe, he finally listened when we used the safe-word, and it was home time.

We drove to the city of Johannesburg in pouring rain and pouring traffic to get to the Bella vista lounge. After a two hour nightmare of a sound check, we played our set and the response was pretty okay, especially since we're not even sure where our songs are going at this stage. The recording process has definitely messed with our live performance. But we'll sort it out. We stayed for Tale of the son's set, which was pretty damn awesome (made me think of IfyouarewhatyoueatIcouldbeyoubytomorrow). I was really disappointed to miss "Eyes like mirrors", but it was that or asleep at the wheel on the way back to Pretoria. We'll definitely organize something with them in the near future. Thanks to Riaan and the bands for the opportunity to play.

On Friday, we hit the studio again. My voice was shot by this stage, so we decided to postpone any vocal recording and focus on instrumentation for two songs: a reworked version of "Kids in bad water", and a reworked version of "Christmas card". Jacob played us some of the work he has been doing on the mixes, and I am enormously excited and proud to have other people hear this album.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Jacob took some pictures of our process. I'll try and figure out how to create better web versions of them (no photoshop :( )

We're heading in to the studio in about an hour. Had to wake up early this morning to render out some drums.

We took the rest of the long weekend to complete pre-production on 3 songs: 'Kids in bad water' (as you've not heard it before, but we'll leave it to the album to do the surprising), Up (which was sounding the least convincing last night at 1am), and an accidental new one called 'An easy battle, a lost war'.

The plan is to record 2 songs today, but I suspect that we've made a slight miscalculation somewhere, and we might be pushing for all three tracks.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Saturday came along, and the first thing we did was to have a (slow-) progress meeting. During our hearty heart-to-heart, we decided that our work rate is not where we want it to be. So, come the following few weeks, we are going to up the ante, and geturdun.

Jacob thought that our idea of a "bass synth" was hilarious, and after he did a quick substitution for illustration purposes, I can now see why he thought so: HUGE! He also contributed some colossal drums that made my tummy feel funny.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

I've been in class for the last two boring weeks, so I was not able to update the blog with what song we were planning to record last Saturday.

We recorded a track called "Loose Thoughts". It was awesome fun to have Werner sit extra still while Jacob tried to find the sweet spot (of his classical guitar). I swear, the boy has a serious case of the ants-in-pants. The song is sounding beautiful, even in it's raw untreated state. We messed around with some gritty sounds, including the zip of my pedal-case and the creaky tuners on said classical guitar. There is still quite a few ideas that we have to add to it, including some guest vocals by Ola from Fulka. Check them out on the 23rd of March at Tings&Times, playing with our dear friends The Watermark High, and cool, jazzy weirdos ION.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

We spent Day 4 shaping and mixing 'Sinners', getting it video-ready for our friend Louis Minnaar. This was not the progress we were planning on for the day, but it is awesome progress none the less. I haven't stopped listening and scrutinising every detail of the mp3 since.

It is Day 5 now, and we're currently mixing 'Beware, she wears a vengeful heart'. I completed the vocals this morning, and currently I'm amusing myself by typing this blog entry. Jacob is trying to sort through the maze that is Werner's drum beats. He is doing this pretty much on his own, because Werner has an extreme head cold and is out for the count. He's going home now, and thus I have to help Mr. Israel. I guess that means:

Friday, February 19, 2010

What a week! First, Jacob Israel tore us all a new one. Quadraphonic glitches piercing your eardrums, combined with mesmerizing live strings, makes for one tremendous show. If you are electronically inclined and you have not yet listened to him, do it now.then:We had an excellent time at +27 last night. Thanks to Louis and Gerhard for the chance to play at your exhibition. The work was outstanding. Also, thanks to everyone who came out. We hope you had a good time and that you didn't mind my "dancing". Also, thanks to +27 for a lovely atmosphere.

Tomorrow, Saturday, the 20th of February 2010, we're heading into the studio again. We hope to complete a lot of the work on a song called "Beware, she wears a vengeful heart". Werner thinks it's a good idea to post the pre-production stuff that we've recorded when we're going to track them in the studio. He never gets to make any decisions, so I'm humoring him here:

Monday, February 8, 2010

Everything is just a bit different than we expected: Everything is taking just a bit longer than we anticipated. Every song is sounding just a bit different in the studio than in our pre-production recordings. Jacob is just a bit more accommodating than we expected. Jacob thinks just a bit differently about our ideas than we do. Jacob is just a tad more of a genius than we expected. We know just a bit less about home-recording than we thought we did.

On Saturday we went into the studio again, committed to recording 'Cool Hero' this time. For some inexplicable reason, we started preparing the tracks for 'Tatters' instead, and before I knew it, I was knee deep in harmonies and beats. At some stage, while Werner and Jacob were arguing the merits of a certain drumbeat, compromising to-and-fro, it struck me that we were busy making an album now. Everybody just seemed so passionate about the project. What they ended up with made me happy and sad at the same time.

Here is the pre-production for the track we did then. Should be really interesting to compare this to the final product:

We are playing a show at +27 Design Cafe (Pretoria) next week Thursday (18 February 2010), to support a collaborative exhibition by Gerhard Uys and Louis Minnaar.

Also, Jacob Israel is launching his ridiculously good album in next week at Tings and Times (Pretoria), on Tuesday (16 February 2010). Expect something different from this show. From the rumours we've heard, this should be breathtaking.

Monday, February 1, 2010

There were teething problems a plenty on Saturday, with us not having everything available in the formats that Mr. Israel needed them. We finally got 2 of the songs studio-ready, and I did vocals for one of them in the last hour of the day (it is sounding fantastic). Now that we have a better idea of what is required from us, things should move much faster from here on in.

The studio has such a relaxed vibe to it, and it is fascinating to see Jacob Israel performing his magic. He ran some of our midi through his Prophet synth and the bass made the pillars in the studio vibrate. If we stop updating this blog, it is because the roof has collapsed in on us.

We're going in tonight to play around for another few hours. Damn day jobs. We'll try to take some pictures on Saturday and post them.

Monday, January 25, 2010

We used the weekend to complete another song's pre-production, we recorded "Cool Hero", the same song that we posted on youtube and on this blog a while back. I must say that we are extremely excited about this.

And then... we used the rest of the time helping my (CF's) girlfriend to put a little internal branding video together for her company. We recorded an idea that we used in the draft of her video, and we're considering whether to use this song, or one other one, for the album as well.You can take a listen to the rough edit:

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

We've been quiet on the blog front, but I promise that we have not been quiet on the writing front. After playing with Jacob Israel at The Watermark High album launch, we went to have a drink with him and we decided it's a good idea to do an album. We took the December holidays to solidify our thoughts, and met with JI the other day, deciding that the 30th of January will be our first day of recording.

I am experiencing that feeling you get when running up the down-escalator. Everything is happening just a bit faster than I can manage it. For instance: we have decided on 12 songs to record, and we're tackling the pre production at home, but we are only done with 5 songs in that department. It's hustle time!

We've been tapping a few resources (thank God for friends) to help us in some of the design departments, and I am greatly excited to see what these peeps will get up to.

If I can just get my damn research proposal in, I might be able to record a ditty for you guys, before we head into radio silence for the album.